TB/HIV Intergration workshop

On 22nd July,2009 NZP+ Lusaka held a workshop where 22 NZP+ members attended ,the last session of the workshop was a presentation on the stop stock outs campaign ,the presentation was done by casco Mubanga one of he country team member, in his presentation Casco introduced the essential medicine concept and the stock out campaign, it was mentioned that availability of essential medicines in clinics was key for opportunistic infections for people living with HIV, a discussion was held to make people understand what was a stock out, the consequences of stock outs of essential medicines and the role of the community in the stop stock outs campaign,also in the presentation Banza Chela from TALC took part in the presentations, in the same workshop Claudio a fellow from New York made another presentation on the Pill SMS week.

Claudio talked about the SMS campaign and the feedback received from other district that participated and he also echoed that this data was very useful for advocacy, he said advocacy was more meaningful with such data from the ground, in the same presentation Claudio briefly mentioned about the technical part of the SMS system, at the end Claudio shared a video interview that was done with a patient that had suffered from Malaria unofrtunately experienced a stock out of anti malaria from Chipata clinic where she went to seek for treatment, she was forced to buy the drug from the private pharmacy. The campaign was welcomed by participates who showed a lot of interested in the project and pledged full support for the campaign. Fact sheets that have been produced for the campaign were also distributed in the workshop.